Giving Compass' Take:

• The editors at SSIR highlight a list of articles to help your team define and achieve its goals for doing better and being a leader of social change in 2020.

• How can these practices be applied to your ongoing efforts? How can these practices shape future efforts? 

• Learn more about promoting social change effectively. 

The outsized need for innovative solutions to today’s social problems can leave nonprofit leaders feeling overwhelmed, and uncertainties about the economy and political landscape can compound the anxiety. Yet organizations still need to grow and evolve, and the New Year offers an opportunity to re-examine and refresh old goals while creating new ones. Read on for insight into moving your team forward in 2020.

  • How to Get Your Funding and Fundraising in Order. With an understanding of these 10 funding models, nonprofit leaders can use the for-profit world's valuable practice of engaging in succinct and clear conversations about long-term financial strategy.
  • How to Build a Stronger Organization. What if all social impact organizations held their leaders and staff accountable not only for what they accomplish, but also for how they accomplish it?
  • How to Plan for the Future. A culture of strategic planning can provide a framework for aligning priorities, making decisions, allocating resources, and measuring impact.
  • How to Improve DEI Efforts. To establish more diversity, equity, and inclusion across sectors, we need to reimagine the traditional mentor and mentee relationship to shift power to younger and less experienced colleagues who possess unique insight into bias and racial dynamics.
  • How to Work Together. Funders need to push past politeness and hammer out expectations for how their collective action will create value—for beneficiaries, grantees, and themselves—beyond what they could do alone.
  • How to Engage the Public. People fail to act not because they do not have enough information, but because they don’t care or they don’t know what to do. This article outlines five principles based in social science that will help organizations connect their work to what people care most about.
  • How to Encourage Innovation. By working closely with the clients and consumers, design thinking allows high-impact solutions to social problems to bubble up from below rather than being imposed from the top.

Read the full article about being a leader of social change in 2020 by the team at Stanford Social Innovation Review.